Wednesday, July 1, 2015

CyanogenMod is a custom version of the Android
operating system. It's here to offer a 'better' version than Google can
provide, with more features and more control for the hardcore user. It
may sound a lot like one of those custom interfaces you get with phones
like the Samsung Galaxy.

It may sound a lot like one of those custom interfaces you get with phones like the Samsung Galaxy S6.
But with CyanogenMod there’s no performance-denting, memory-sapping
bloat, and it’s pretty easy to get the look and feel of a standard
Android phone if that is what you’re after.
With CyanogenMod OS 12 now hitting compatible handsets around the globe, and with the news that Microsoft might be preinstalling its apps on future iterations, it's clearly a pretty hot topic right now.

CyanogenMod (pronounced sigh-AN-oh-jen-mod), is a customized,
aftermarket firmware distribution for several Android devices. Based on the Android Open Source Project, CyanogenMod is
designed to increase performance and reliability over Android-based ROMs
released by vendors and carriers such as Google, T-Mobile, HTC, etc.
CyanogenMod also offers a variety of features & enhancements that
are not currently found in these versions of Android.

While this build is heavily optimized, it is also capable of pushing
your phone much harder. CyanogenMod and it’s team hold no responsibility
to any damage caused to your phone, loss of earnings as a result of
damaging your phone or anything else that is connected to the
development of this rom.

For a list of devices officially supported by CyanogenMod, check out the official devices
page. Such is the craze for CyanogenMod, that devices that aren’t
officially supported, still manage to receive ports of the ROM courtesy
of enthusiasts and developers. CyanogenMod offers the most barebone
Android experience coupled with some very powerful tweaks. This whole
package by now is not wholly developed by CyanogenMod developers alone,
but is a collaborative effort between them and independent developers
around the world.

Who makes CyanogenMod and how long has it been around?

The
first version of CyanogenMod was produced not all that long after the
very first Android phone was released. In the UK that mobile was known
as the T-Mobile G1, which went on sale back in 2008.
An
exploit was found that let people fiddle with the phone’s insides, and
shortly afterwards developer Steve Kondik started working on his own
tweaked version of Android. And the first version of CyanogenMod was
born. He caught the eye of Samsung and joined the company asa software
engineer in 2011.
But that’s not the end of Steve’s story with
CyanogenMod. As well as continuing to oversee Cyanogen while at Samsung,
Kondik left the tech giant in March 2013.
With the help of hindsight, we know why.
In
September 2013, Kondik raised $7 million in venture capital funds to
‘go legit’ with CyanogenMod, with the aim of turning it from a nerdy
internet mod to something that could be used in commercial products. It
raised another 23 million dollars in December 2013, and Chinese
leviathan of tech Tencent was one of the core backers.

What phones have CyanogenMod?

Phones
that use CyanogenMod natively have already started appearing, and
unsurprisingly they come from Chinese companies. Companies like Samsung,
HTC and LG are unlikely to adopt CyanogenMod any time soon.

Probably the most high-profile phone to get CyanogenMod is the OnePlus One.
It’s a phone that sells for as little as £269 but offers specs similar
to those of phones costing a good deal more. You just won’t find it on
the shelves of any shop in the UK. While CyanogenMod is getting a bit
more mainstream, it’s still here to appeal to the more investigative,
more intense Android phone user.Another, older phone that shipped
with CyanogenMod preinstalled was the Oppo N1, a phone with an unusual
swivel camera. Although not widely known, Oppo owns OnePlus, and the
relationship between Oppo, OnePlus, and Cyanogen used to be very much a
love-in of plucky underdogs.
That relationship has soured a little
in recent times, largely thanks to Cyanogen signing a deal with Indian
manufacturer Micromax to feature the OS exclusively in the latter's home
country. This locked out the OnePlus One from launching in an emerging
and lucrative territory.
This has led to OnePlus developing and
releasing its own custom OS, OxygenOS, in recent weeks - although
Cyanogen 12 OS also made its way to the OnePlus One mere days later.
Other Cyanogen phones like the Alcatel Onetouch Hero 2+ and the Yu Yureka aren't available to buy in the UK.

How do I get CyanogenMod?

If
you want to install CyanogenMod on your own phone, you still need a few
nerd chops. The steps you need to go through vary between devices, but
CyanogenMod has done its best to make the process as simple as possible.
This
is one of the benefits of the company having developed on from an indie
project roots, where installation instructions generally assume you
understand 60 per cent of the techy lingo before you’ve even started.
By going to http://get.cm
on your phone, you’ll download a ‘one click’ CyanogenMod installer that
will take you through the process. You’ll also need a PC-based installer app available from CyanogenMod, as the process requires a fair bit more than just a simple app install.

But should you bother? Installing a
custom version of Android on your phone will almost certainly void its
warranty, so it’s worth thinking about. Not terrified by the prospect?
Here are some things you can do with the latest version of CyanogenMod,
version 12, as recently released for the OnePlus One.

5 things you can do with CyanogenMod 12

Apply system-wide themes
One
of the neatest features of CyanogenMod 12 is the theme installer. It’s
dead accessible, and lets you thoroughly reskin your phone with just
about zero effort. What’s better than customising your phone yourself?
Getting someone else to the leg work for you, of course.
CyanogenMod
12 themes alter fonts, lock screen styles, app icons and even
notification and alarm sounds. They effectively give your phone a
complete reskin, without any of the residual wonkiness you often get
with custom home launchers you can run on any Android phone.
Of
course, this has become less of a big deal since the likes of HTC and
Samsung jumped on the theming bandwagon. But do either of those
companies allow you to theme individual apps? That's precisely what you
can do with CyanogenMod 12's App Themer.

Get a taste of Lollipop
Yes,
CyanogenMod is all about the customisation potential, but it's also a
neat way to get a stock Android experience on the majority of Android
phones that don't have it yet.
Even if your phone does have
Lollipop, CyanogenMod is also a great way of getting a purer Lollipop
experience. It's got a nice clean Lollipop-like appearance as standard,
which is more than can be said for the custom efforts of most major
manufacturers.
You also get handy Android 5.0 additions like those improved notifications and multi-user support.

Custom profilesCyanogenMod
lets you set a whole bunch of different profiles that alter the
behaviour of your phone. These profiles save settings for things like
Bluetooth, mobile data and Wi-Fi, giving you pretty good control over
how much juice your phone uses throughout the day. You can also tweak
how notifications come through for SMS, emails and so on.
You can
even make them trigger when your phone is docked with an NFC tag, or
when it connects to a certain Wi-Fi network. It’s up to you to put in
the initial legwork of dictating how these work, but they should prove
extremely useful. You switch profiles manually from the power-off menu,
just as you would when switching to aeroplane mode.

Tweak the screen calibration
CyanogenMod
has long let you tweak the look of your screen, fiddling with things
like contrast and colour saturation. It comes in very useful if you find
your phone’s normal colours a bit oversaturated, or a little
dull-looking.
Version 12 introduces LiveDisplay, a new hub for
panel calibration that lets you mess with colour temperature, automated
effective times, screen colour and colour calibration, and to lower
power consumption.

Advanced gestures
Many
phones have little extra gestures these days, but with the latest
version of CyanogenMod you get ones that don’t even require the screen
to be on in order to register. We imagine this won’t be suitable for all
phones, but it works well on the OnePlus One.
Draw a circle on
the phone’s screen while it’s in standby and the camera will launch.
When music is playing, a two-fingered vertical swipe will play/pause the
audio, and left/right arrows drawn will switch tracks. The most
unusual, though, is that drawing a V will turn the LED torch on. And
there was us wondering why the flash kept on turning on in-pocket. You
can turn these off if you’re not a gestures fan.

Are there downsides to CyanogenMod?

These
extras only scratch at the surface of CyanogenMod - there’s loads more
to discover too. But is there a reason not to try the software?
The
main issue is the problem of knocking out your phone’s warranty.
However, there’s also the question of future updates. Historically,
CyanogenMod has been great at providing up-to-date versions of Android
to act as the base of the software, but it has decided to take its time
over Android 5.0 Lollipop.
Needing
to deliver a decent-quality experience from day one is the burden of a
‘proper’ company, and that is what Cyanogen Inc. is these days. "We
could spend the next 3 weeks working on integrating CM features against
this new platform, and then have it suddenly change dramatically and
break in the final release of “L”. This would boil down to a waste of
time," said a member of the CyanogenMod team on its official blog of the
protracted wait for CyanogenMod 12.

CyanogenMod also lacks some
features found in other custom versions of Android. Most notably, you
don’t get the extreme power-saving modes seen in phones like the Galaxy
S6.
Also, not everyone will take kindly to the aforementioned news
that Cyanogen is to pre-install Microsoft apps with future versions.
The likes of Skype, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook, Bing, and Microsoft
Office will be appearing thanks to a "strategic partnership," which will
probably turn the stomach of many that were attracted to this
independent champion of the small, open source, and modified.

Should
all of this be enough to put you off? We wouldn’t recommend diving in
with CyanogenMod on your brand new contract phone. But for playing
around with on an older device? Absolutely, dip in - the water’s warm.

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